No Trust, No Respect

For the past four months, the fierce fighting between the civil servants of Delhi and Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, has continued. There is a stand-still kind of a situation. The Chief Minister’s office and civil servants work on mutual trust and respect. But in Delhi both these traits are non-existent. IAS AGMUT Association says there’s no strike; work is on with “written communications”. However, Kejriwal doesn’t wish to issue written orders; officials don’t want to work on the basis of verbal orders. Kejriwal devised a new idea; he and his deputy CM, Manish Sisodia, and two other cabinet ministers, spent the night in the waiting room of the Lt. Governor’s residence, and protested against what they claimed was the LG’s inaction to end the bureaucrats’ strike. “In the history of independent India, this is the first time that IAS officers have gone on strike for four months. Why?” — Kejriwal tweeted. IAS AGMUT Association strongly refuted the charges, and said that no officer has been on strike subsequent to the assault on Delhi Chief Secretary at midnight on February 19, 2018. In a statement, the Association said that the officers “continue to work with full vigour and dedication, in fact, many times even on holidays”.

Kejriwal issued a statement citing various examples of work getting halted due to the non-cooperation of the officers. He named the officers and described how they were not co-operating, not even returning the phone calls of the ministers concerned. The IAS officers, however, say that they are regularly attending the offices. “However, the officers are not attending routine meetings called by the Ministers and the CM. The AGMUT association says that the CM and the Ministers have failed to give any assurance regarding the safety, security, dignity and respect of the officers, including the women officials. “Due to the genuine apprehensions in the mind of officials, we are constrained to have interaction with the Ministers only by means of written communications”, the Association of the AGMUT cadre IAS officers said in its statement. Kejriwal has to nurture his constituency, so he went to LG’s house, and spent the night in the waiting room. He issued pictures to the press.